Untold Tales from the Zombie War
by KevinR1990
Summary: Some looks at the zombie apocalypse and the post-zombie world that didn't make the cut, from Quebec to Burbank and beyond. CONTENT NOTES: Strong language and zombie mayhem, because, hey, it's a zombie story. UPDATE: Chapter 5 now up! Zombies invade the Olive Garden!
1. Philippe Desjardin, Quebec City, Quebec

_[Note: I do not own World War Z or the Zombie Survival Guide. They are the property of Max Brooks and Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Don't sue me.]_

_[This fic is rated M for coarse language and because, hey, it's a fucking zombie story.]_

_[Oh, and I preemptively apologize to any Canadians that this chapter may offend.]  
_

**QUEBEC CITY, QUEBEC, CANADA**

_[The historic Citadelle de Québec looms over the city and the St. Lawrence River, affording an excellent defensive position from which to spot and battle incoming hordes. It served as the headquarters of the __Assemblée nationale du Québec__ for the duration of the war, and remains a major tourist destination for Canadians, with the benefit of being located within blocks of the historic Chateau Frontenac. It is here that I meet Philippe Desjardin, a short, mustached detective for the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, and a veteran of the defense of Québec.]_

This city we're in, Québec City, you could not find a better defensive location in North America if you tried. First of all, it's freezing. You've heard the old saying, right? "Canada's not a country, it's winter"? Well, this is what they meant. Even before the war we usually got our first snow in October, and by the end of winter – defined here as "late April" – we'd have shoveled our way through over three meters of snow in a normal year. Throw the Zombie Ice Age on top of that, and that meant that in la Ville de Québec we only got three months of warm weather on average. And if you got up in Saguenay, that became two. I don't think they ever saw a major outbreak up there.

Second, we had enough electricity for everything we could possibly need. When _la Panique_ hit we got 90% of our power supply from the dams that Hydro-Québec had built up north. That was on top of all the natural resources we could dig out of the Nord-du-Québec and Labrador. We weren't like you guys in the US, who got most of their electricity from burning fossil fuels. When we lost our oil, our coal and our gas, sure, it hurt, but even before you factor out the initial dead during _la Panique_, we still had enough power to keep every house and factory in Québec lit so long as the lines stayed up. That was the main problem – maintaining and repairing thousands of miles of high-tension power lines. The 2016 ice storm took out power for nearly the entire province. Took over half a year to repair them all. We nearly lost Sherbrooke that June. Sherbrooke, _merde_, now that was certainly _not_ our most shining moment.

Third, Québec City had walls. You probably saw some of them coming into this town. The Europeans like to go on about how North America didn't have any castles or fortresses… if so, then what the hell was Québec City? We still had our walls from the colonial era, we didn't tear 'em down and build over them like you did to your historic landmarks, and the moment _la Panique_ hit we were restoring them to their original purpose. It was like that little Welsh town Conwy on steroids. We moved our entire government into la Citadelle – the French didn't call it that for nothing, you know – and turned Vieux-Québec into a fortress.

Fourth, we never had our version of Yonkers. Other countries did – the Koreans had Incheon, the Mexicans had Guadalajara. But our nation was practically attached to America at the hip. Many of us lived close enough to the border to get your TV over the air, and most of our cable and satellite companies carried American news networks. We were able to learn from your mistakes at Yonkers, see what not to do – the infection took longer to spread here thanks to our long winters, so by the time we reached the stage where something like Yonkers could have happened, we had already seen it happen to the largest, most powerful army on Earth.

There was that too; we didn't have the globetrotting, high-tech military force that you did. The whole F-35 debacle shook us out of that mentality. Our army was geared for peacekeeping and Arctic patrols, lots of infantry and transports, not a lot of armor. There were a few people before the war even saying that we should get rid of our main battle tanks and replace them with Stryker IFVs. I remember before the war, most Americans mocked us as a bunch of bleeding-heart pacifists who couldn't fight a "real" war like you guys had been doing. Probably 'cause we harbored all your draft dodgers during Vietnam. Well, that turned out to be a godsend once we all saw firsthand how much good all your tanks, rockets, fighters and E-war gear did against the undead.

_[Philippe snorts in derision.]_

So after _la Panique_ was through, our armed forces were in a fair bit better shape than your own. Beaten bloody, yes, but at least we still _had_ an army.

And finally, there was Canadian bilingualism. What one must understand before examining Canada's actions during the Zombie War is that it was, and still is, essentially two peoples in one nation. Everything that was done in English had to be done in French as well. Road signs, public documents, product labels, everything was bilingual. Our laws served as the model for how you dealt with the large Latino minority in your safe zone. _[The American safe zone contained many of the areas with the largest concentrations of Spanish speakers in the country.]_ And our bilingualism extended all the way to Ottawa's response to the living dead.

Or at least, that was the theory. In reality, it extended to the _reaction_ to Ottawa's response to the living dead. The MacKay Plan pretty much called for pulling everything back to BC, the Yukon and Alberta, back to the Rockies like the Americans were doing and trying to hold onto a little extra land while they were at it. It wasn't a plan to save Canada. It was a plan to save the ruling party's constituency and sell out the rest of Canada once again. Two-thirds of Canadians lived in the east, and the only ways to get to the west were either down the Trans-Canada "Highway", a glorified country road that was only two lanes wide for about five hundred miles, or going through fucking Michigan. Ah yes, Michigan. First you had to cross the St. Clair River, _after_ we blew all the bridges and tunnels across the border to stop the millions of American refugees trying to "go north", then you had to go through the millions of infected and undead that got stuck in Michigan as a result. You remember how bad the Battle of Detroit was, don't you? That's why. That was the choice they offered everyone east of Thunder Bay: go through one of the hottest white zones on the continent, or down a two-lane street that was more clogged than a truck stop toilet on Free Burrito Night. They knew damn well that almost nobody was gonna make it west, and they didn't care. As long as Calgary and Edmonton were saved, right?

And how were we gonna get all the soldiers we had in the east all the way west in the middle of the apocalypse? _[Before the war, 45% of Canada's military assets were concentrated in Nova Scotia alone.]_ And to think that they blame _us_ in Québec for what happened in Calgary, for the desperation of all the people who tried to go north into the territories, by "stopping" the soldiers from reaching the front in Alberta. How the hell were they gonna cross five thousand kilometers when they'd run out of gas and all the roads west were impassable thanks to the traffic jams the government had created with their bird-brained "survival plan"? I'm surprised that Canada's still holding together as one nation after the shit they pulled.

You know the exact moment when I realized that the government didn't give a damn about anyone who didn't live in the west and whose vote they didn't own? When they rationalized not supporting any blue zones or holdouts east of Manitoba because they figured that all the American blue zones just over the border would be enough to distract the zombies. Limited resources, they said. The entire point of the plan was supposed to be that our nation would be preserved afterwards, and instead, they sold us out and left us for dead. And in the end, look at what all their effort went to in Calgary.

Oh yeah, Calgary… right on one of the main roads into BC, sitting just in front of the mountain pass that thousands of infected Canadians, and some Americans, were trying to get through… it wasn't our Yonkers, but it was our Denver. No, no it wasn't. Denver was your Calgary. Both of them, big cities on the very edge of the safe zone, populations ballooned by refugees from the east. Festering cauldrons of undeath located exactly where we didn't want them, right in front of us. Couldn't have happened to nicer people.

**So how did Québec survive?**

The east felt that, if it wasn't gonna get any help from the government, then it was just gonna scrape together its own version of Redeker. Québec had been planning its own survival plan for quite a while by this point. They were doing the same thing in the Maritimes – Newfoundland and Labrador became just Labrador, Nova Scotia pulled up to Cape Breton, New Brunswick moved up into the mountains north of the Miramichi, and all PEI had to do was blow the only bridge to the island and hunker down. _Merde_, if it weren't for the Maritimes, let's just say the people of Québec would be a hell of a lot slimmer right now. The potato farmers and fishermen of the Maritimes, the unsung heroes of the Canadian front. What we did after the Mackay Plan was implemented was pool our resources and coordinate our efforts. We still had most of the population, most of the industry, and plentiful hydropower, so we had some footing to do this. We also had some help from the New England blue zones – northern Vermont and New Hampshire, Pittsfield and Cape Cod in Massachusetts – who we traded with for some of the surplus food they were growing or catching in exchange for coal, manufactured goods, medicine and other necessities. Most of Ontario was overrun by then, but we still aided what survivor camps we could, like Napanee.

Almost immediately, we acknowledged that saving Montréal was a lost cause. It was the epicenter of Québec's first outbreaks, what with it being the financial center, the site of the province's main airport, and the first big city most New Yorkers and Ontarians saw coming into the blue zone. Worse, it was just like Paris – it had a huge underground city, _la Ville Souterraine_, the largest underground complex on Earth. It had not just the subways, but also malls, museums, walkways, all connecting most of Montréal's office space, businesses and homes. Any advantage the cold gave us would've been erased in those tunnels, shielded from the winters on the surface. That's why they built that thing in the first place, to spare the Montréalais from having to walk the streets in _janvier_. Defending Montréal was never once on the table. Even clearing the place out was a horror, trying to save it would've been Yonkers all over again. We evacuated it and sealed off what was left – we were fortunate that our big "death trap" city was on an island unlike Paris. Ditto for Gatineau. It was right next to Ottawa, which saw so many refugees early in the war that it was positively swarming with undead. Evac the uninfected, pull them east. That was our goal.

**But couldn't zombies cross the water?**

And why would that be a problem for us? It wasn't like they were crossing a still lake. The St. Lawrence is a big damn river, about as wide as the lower Mississippi; many of them got swept out to sea before they could touch us. That's another thing that kept us safe – we had that big damn river separating us from the cities to the south. Boston, Halifax, New York, there must've been millions of zombies coming out of those places. But between that, the cold, the mountains in northern New England, and the big blue zones surrounding us, I'd venture to say that most of them never reached Québec. Not only were we able to hold nearly all the land within Québec south of the river and coordinate with the Maritimes, but we even sent some aid to the blue zones in New England and the Adirondacks – that slowed 'em down even more – and we effectively controlled Aroostook County after the US government pulled out. Note to Washington: Aroostook County is Canadian now. Just get over it.

The refugees sure crossed the river, though. I think about a million and a half people made it into Québec from points south and west. _[A slight exaggeration. The 2021 census, taken near the end of the Zombie War, puts Québec's population at 4.5 million, of whom only 1.2 million had lived outside the province before the war.]_ That presented a problem for us. Not materially; we'd lost enough population during and after _la Panique_ that we had more than enough room, food and water for everyone. No, this problem was cultural. There were about seventy-five thousand Franco-Ontarians and New Brunswick Acadians in the mix, but the vast majority of these refugees came in speaking English, and a lot of locals had issues with that. These people made up a quarter of the population we had at the height of the war, and if you add in the people who spoke English before the war you could understand the fear that some Francophones had. We'd survive the war, they'd say, but would our culture? Two hundred years of preserving our heritage, just for it to become one more casualty of the zombie war. That was when you had the rise of the NFLQ _[The Nouvelle front de libération du Québec, taking its name and iconography from an armed __Québec_ separatist group prominent in the 1960s.], harassing and even murdering Anglo refugees. We were forced to clamp down hard.

Anyway, those fears turned out to be mostly unfounded as time wore on. For one, many of those people were gripped by the "northern fever" thanks to the media telling them to go north to escape the zombies. That million and a half figure I gave you? That was just the people who stayed in the safe zones with most of our population, and a great many more didn't stop there. No, some kept going all the way into the Cree country up north. Now _that_ was a fuckup you don't even wanna know about.

**Well, that's what I'm here for, right? Please, tell me.**

No, I'm serious. You don't wanna know. I spoke to some of those guys and…

**You know you're just making me more curious, right?**

_[Philippe hesitates, then sighs.]_

Okay. You win. People who talk about how awful northern Canada was during the war, with the freezing to death and the Donner Party shit, they most likely heard about it from people who went west of here. Northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the territories, places where the government had pulled out from. That wasn't Québec. A lot of our dams were in the north, so we had to have troops up there out of necessity, defending the dams and the lines running south. We even managed to resettle and retrain some of the "go north" crowd to maintain the plants and the wires. About half the people who came north to Québec generally received aid the first winter. Sure, there were those dumb shits who kept going up into Nunavik and on to fuckin' Baffin Island, but further south it wasn't as bad here as it was to the west. No, we had completely different problems with our north.

We had about twenty five thousand First Nations – mostly Cree, some Inuit – living in the Nord-du-Québec before the war, and hundreds of thousands more in the rest of Canada. Most of them lived in the cities by that point – there actually existed First Nations street gangs out in Saskatchewan – but there were still a lot of traditional hunters, fishermen, your general all-around bushwhackers. Those guys, the "redneck red men" as I like to call 'em, mostly lived up in the north of Canada, up in the territories and on the Canadian Shield. You know, the types of places that the media was telling people to flee to. They weren't as numerous or organized as we were, no, they got outnumbered very quickly. It was about a million First Nations versus some twenty million starving and desperate refugees, and it went about as well as you can expect.

Can you believe an Indian war – a good, old-fashioned game of cowboys and Indians like something out of a John Wayne flick – happening in the 21st century? Well, that's exactly what went on up there, roaming bands of refugees and natives raiding camps and attacking each other on sight, and we didn't find out about it until Yellowknife went dark. We all thought it was an outbreak that took the city. Only after we got to the place did we realize that it was a band of pissed-off Eskimos – sorry, Inuit – that burned that town to the fucking ground. There was also Chibougamau, _mon dieu_, if it weren't for them running out of ammo we would've lost the town and a critical substation. We were too busy trying to defend the dams and the power lines to take care of the situation. It was just too much empty land to even scout. That shitstorm was half the reason why it took so long for us to clear out the white zones. We needed a Truth and Reconciliation Committee, like what the Souf'ricans had after apartheid, to sort out what had happened. There's still nearly a quarter million Cree, Ojibwa and Inuit that'd love to tell you all about it. Shania's even written a ballad about what went on up north.

Anyway, got a bit sidetracked there. Back to what I was saying about this place. Most people don't realize how powerful a force assimilation can be. I think there were studies in the prewar US that showed that most second- and especially third-generation Latino immigrants spoke English as their primary language, even in places that offered services in Spanish. That's what it was like in Québec. Anglophones were always a firm minority of the population no matter what those fearmongers said. By the time V-A Day was declared, most of these people were almost as fluent in Québec French as they were in English. They still spoke English with their families and Anglo friends, but to interact with the broader society they needed a working knowledge of French. It's the dilemma seen so often in immigrant communities: integrate into the surrounding culture and lose your ties to your heritage, or hold onto your own culture and cut yourself off from your neighbours?

There was a book written by that horror writer from Maine – yeah, he was one of the refugees, I even have his autograph – about this called _L'ironie_. It's about an American family who flees to Québec and finds their children being absorbed into the native culture and forgetting their roots. The dad in the book was this arch-conservative who had been active in anti-immigration groups before the war, saying that the Mexicans should just assimilate into American culture like immigrants are supposed to, and now his family was being subjected to the very same forces of assimilation that he had once cheered for. It's a bestseller among the "New Acadians", those Americans from the East Coast who lived in Québec during the war. If you go to Boston or New Jersey, you can still hear the French influence in the local accents, brought back by the New Acadians after the war. Ever hear a New York cabbie shout _"tabarnac!"_ in a fender bender? I did when I was leaving the Yonkers Memorial Station to see my in-laws. One of the funniest things I heard in my life. Vermont and Maine are even mulling bilingual laws from what I've heard.

There's still about a quarter million of them living here in Québec. You know those new eco-friendly hydro plants that don't dam up rivers? It was a New Acadian who designed them. High school honor student before the war. Came up here, got a job with Hydro-Québec, designed a ton of those plants for us, liked it up here, stayed here even when her parents went back home, and now she's my wife.

_[Philippe turns to a woman sitting at a nearby bench and calls over to her in French. She runs over to Philippe and has a seat by him. They are wearing matching wedding rings.]_

Sir, I'd like you to meet my wife Deirdre Sullivan.

_[Deirdre reaches out to shake my hand. She has curly strawberry-blonde hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and stands a head taller than her husband. She speaks in a hybrid of a Queens and Québec accent.]_

**Nice to meet you, ma'am.**

It's nice meeting you, too.

_[She points out at the long structures running along the banks of the St. Lawrence.]_

See those things? I designed them. I was always fascinated by the old industry in New England, how it was the old industrial heartland even without the big steel mills. They used to make all sorts of things there – shirts, hats, guns, wire, et cetera et cetera. Hell, they used to make things period, before NAFTA and shit like that came along. They didn't need to pump soot into the air to do it, either, they had free-flowing hydro power on every river, creek and stream. That's where I got the idea, from the old water wheels that they had, but way more efficient. Get power from the water without killing fish. Where better to put it to use than in a place as great as here?

_[She stops for a second.]_

You mind if, just for a bit, I go on a little rant?

**Go right ahead.**

_[She slouches in the park bench and relaxes.]_

You know, they used to call these people, the Québécois, the "white niggas of Canada". They'd been shit on for two hundred years, by the British who wanted to turn them into good Englishmen, by the Orangemen, and by the right-wing Western bloc who wished they'd just secede already and take their damn pinko ways with them. Yet through it all, they were some of the proudest Canadians around. To them, this was _their_ country, they were here first, and the Anglos had no right to take their way of life away from them. Do you know what the vast majority of Québécois list their ethnicity as? Not French, but simply "Canadian". The father of Canadian nationalism, Henri Bourassa, was a native of Montréal. He said, why should our boys be dying for the British a continent away? Maybe it's the Irish in me, I don't know, my dad used to support Noraid _[An Irish-American activist group that gave financial and material aid, including weapons, to the Provisional IRA during the Troubles.]_, but I totally understand their grievances. And when Canada's darkest hour came, the Anglos once again tried to screw the Québécois, saying that we should defend Alberta – the open prairie of Alberta – and that it was useless to save Québec.

Well, we see how well that worked out, didn't we? Québec is one of our most vibrant provinces now. We have more people than any other, we have almost half of our industry, we're a global pioneer in alternative energy, and two-fifths of Canadians speak French as a first language. What was it before the war, twenty percent, and falling? Exactly. Toronto, once the heart of Anglo Canada, home of fuckin' Orangemen? Now it's a third Francophone and being rebuilt chiefly by firms out of Québec. If we are indeed the white niggas of Canada, then all I have to say is this:

_[Deirdre gives her best impression of the Black Power salute. Philippe gives me an embarrassed look before speaking to me.]_

Forgive her, she's rolling.


	2. Lena Gutierrez, Malibu, California

**MALIBU, CALIFORNIA, USA**

_[As Roy Elliot walks back down the Malibu Pier Fortress back to his car, my next interview, and by far the biggest name on my list, parks her touring bike and walks down to me. Lena Gutierrez still has her childlike face despite the fact that she's pushing forty, and walks with all the glow that one would expect from somebody who had just won an Oscar for Best Actress. While passersby mostly keep their distance, all eyes are focused on her as she takes a seat next to me.]_

I've learned to forgive my old bosses. Sure, they were a bunch of soulless corporate hacks who Breck Scott will likely be joining in the fourth circle, but they thought they were protecting their talent, and in hindsight they were right, at least on that count. And from a purely financial perspective, it looked like a good idea at the time. Shareholders still meant something in the early days of the Panic, so if you told them that you were going to kill your golden geese and cancel all production on new shows and movies, how long do you think it would take before your pink slip came in?

When corporate found out about that celebrity fortress in Long Island, a lightbulb must've lit up in their heads. They were not only going to create their own retreat around their studio in Burbank, private security and all, but they would keep filming new material for the duration of the zombie apocalypse. It helped that pretty much their entire cast and crew, plus their families, lived in the LA area. Most of us – those who hadn't run for the hills, at least – managed to make it to the new studio in time to get the place up and running. Since the TV system was reserved for news, propaganda and emergency alerts, we cranked out a feature film about once every month instead of shooting TV episodes. Some of the movies were original, a few of them were continuations of old series. My show was one of those that got continued. _Mind Over Manners_, it was called. You look like you're old enough to remember it.

**That was the one about the high school kids with psychic powers, right? My little sister loved that show.**

_Lots_ of little sisters loved that show. The last season finale before the Panic was the highest rated program, other than sports, in cable history. I run a little museum for that show, and all the others. A giant shrine to pre-war kids' TV, from the old days of Nickelodeon to the last weeks before the Panic. Filled to the brim with old merchandise that people sent in or scavenged – backpacks, DVD sets, binders, standees, clothes, props from the set, diaries… the diaries. Shit. Forgive my language, but reading some of those diaries, the last thoughts of scared, panicked little kids whose only worry just a few months earlier was whether they'd be allowed to go to the sleepover, or if they could get up the courage to ask their pretty classmate to the middle school dance, or… or…

_[Lena struggles to hold back tears, but quickly collapses. I leave her alone for a couple of minutes before she comes back to normal.]_

Sorry there. It's just… I've tried to push those diaries into the back of my mind. I remember one of them, wishing that Sandra, my character from the show, would come and use her powers to save her from the monsters outside. It was the last entry. I… you know, let's just move on, okay?

_[Not wanting to trouble her any more, I change the subject.]_

**So what went on at Burbank?**

At first we tried to dance, or in our case sing and dance, our way around the giant elephant in the room. We kept making the happy, idealistic comedies and musicals that characterized the old network, avoiding any mention of zombies. The producers seemed to think that, if we could recreate a pre-war fantasy world with our movies, we could raise morale and combat ADS, especially among the young.

Kinda didn't work that way. How were people supposed to go back to the old world when the new one was pounding on their doors and windows every waking moment? And even watching the films we put out you could see right through the veneer of happiness on screen. We'd all lost BFFs and loved ones, we were all fighting back tears trying to smile for the cameras, and it showed. The outside talent pool had dried up – parents had much better things for their kids to do – so most of us had to do double duty, shooting two or even three movies at once. The sets, props and costumes were all getting worn out. Sixteen hour work days weren't uncommon. We all looked like Stepford wives, broken hollow shells trying to pretend that we were happy, and it wasn't working. Eventually, we'd had enough.

**The Burbank riot.**

What else could we do? They were working us like slaves, paying us checks that weren't worth the paper they were printed on. What were we even doing? Cranking out the same pathetic, saccharine pap we were making before the war? I think that some of those movies just made the ADS worse. The final straw was when Bridgit killed herself. Such a sweet girl. The only ray of sunshine still poking through in Burbank, always sang about how we could change the world, and when we were shooting a movie she just pulled out a letter opener and shoved it into her neck. Finally lost it. Mitchell, the asshole who took that footage and put it up online, I wanted to personally throw him into one of those Cuban zombie pits that I always hear about. Too bad he decided to go get drunk and go on a joyride right into the Five Colleges at the height of the Avalon siege. Watching _Miracle at Avalon_ a few months later, I was screaming like a little girl at one of my old concerts when I saw him get eviscerated by that horde. The whole thing, caught on camera and displayed for the whole fucking world to see! Couldn't have died a more fitting death.

S-sorry, got a bit carried away there. What was I saying? Oh yeah.

All hell broke loose after she died. I personally wasn't in the boardroom when my co-workers charged their way up there, but I was in the lobby. I heard the crunch of the CEO's body hitting the ground outside, and saw the smear of red against the concrete. I always wondered who threw him out the window, or if he just jumped and saved them the trouble. Jennette, one of the girls who came here from our old rival network, she says she kicked him out the window like King Leonidas in _300_, but then again, she's Jennette.

**What happened after the riot?**

They closed the studio for about a month. The ringleaders of the whole thing got dragged off for flogging and chain gang duty. I think I felt even more pathetic at that point than I did before. At least when filming was going on I was trying to do something! I was F-6, so I couldn't work. I couldn't contribute. I felt totally worthless.

**Did you ever think about suicide?**

_[A pause.]_

No. Never.

_[Another pause.]_

Y-yes. I couldn't help it. For a time, I thought Bridgit had the right idea. We were losing every day. Nothing was getting any better. I think the only reason why I didn't go through with it was because I took too long thinking about how I wanted to go out.

**What made you change your mind?**

My older brother. He was a huge comics nerd, reading all sorts of stuff from superheroes to Japanese manga. Sometimes, I snooped through his collection when I was bored. It was one of those manga that saved my life and reopened the studio.

_**Class Dismissed**_**.**

Oh yeah. As I read it, I thought up ways in my mind that I could adapt it to an American setting. I brought a couple of the writers in to read it. We watched _Miracle at Avalon_ several times for ideas. That's when we settled on the final idea: us, some cameras, whatever weapons we could scrounge around the sets, and live zombies. Shoot it guerrilla style, in secret. We found a high school in Pasadena that had been used as a refugee camp, and had partly burned down. We rounded up some zombies and made ourselves a little horde that we kept locked up in the gym. In hindsight, what we did could've gotten a lot of people killed, but I don't regret one moment of it.

Especially once we started showing it to the kids back at Burbank.

**What did the studio think of it?**

They flipped right the eff out! They thought we'd all gone insane, going out on our own to shoot a movie, especially just two months after we'd rioted to stop filming. They had half a mind to give us to the police right there and then. But then the kids started raving about it. Suicides dropped to nearly zero. What Roy Elliot's films did for the grown-ups, _Class Dismissed_ did for the youth of Burbank, and from there all over America. The perfect mix of teen romance, catty backstabbing and bone-crunching zombie mayhem. Hell, for many people just the novelty of seeing former tween pop stars killing zombies was enough to get butts in seats. My favorite scene was when we were blasting my old music at full volume to lure the zombies onto the football field for… disposal. Methinks the army owes us some credit for coming up with that trick.

_[She smirks and laughs.]_

The studio was running on full steam after that. Real production values. No more sugary-sweet fantasies. Okay, we were still cranking out fantasies, but they were more along the lines of "I wanna be a badass zombie hunter like Lena Gutierrez" than "I wanna be a fairytale princess/cheerleader/queen bee/pop star". I think our casts and crews burned through half the zombies west of the Rockies, we were making so many zombie-slaying epics. We even cameo'd in one of Elliot's "Wonder Weapons" movies.

Probably the moment when I realized that everything was gonna be alright was when we made _Love Survives_. It was right after we'd started pushing back across the Rockies. That movie was when we returned to the old musical-comedy format that most of us had made our names with. A teen zombie musical. _Yes._ It felt like we were back in the old days again. Finally got to dust off my old talent, the talent that got me hired in the first place. And shooting at Black Rock City, the place in the middle of the Nevada desert where those hipsters and artists banded together and held out for three years before rescue arrived. Ever see _The Burning Dead_, the documentary that they shot there?

**Great movie.**

But that wasn't the best part. Production on that movie just so happened to coincide with when the army reached Tennessee. When I saw them liberating Memphis, I knew that there was exactly one person I wanted to have in this movie. The studio kept saying "no, what if she doesn't make it?" "you can't shoot a movie on the front lines!" Why not? Roy Elliott was doing it all the time, I can't go out there just because I was a woman? And besides, if she could hold out in her bunker in the middle of nowhere for eight years while still writing songs, why can't I make just one visit to shoot this movie?

I can't begin to describe how much of a service she did. Remember when I said my brother's comics saved my life? I… wasn't being entirely truthful there. I picked up her broadcast over a shortwave radio I dug up. When most of the big musicians and celebrities were trying to get to that death trap in Long Island, she simply went back home to be with her family. Bought an old plantation home in southern Tennessee and turned it into a fortress, complete with a radio transmitter to signal for help – and tons of guest homes all around it. She made one last blog post before the power went out, saying that she would welcome all of her fans and anybody else who could reach her compound provided that they were willing to assist in its defense. Over a thousand people showed up. Nearly six hundred of them made it through.

And to think that she kept making music through it all! In between working on her fields and manning the barricades, she used what little spare time she had to maintain her radio station, which she kept improving through the parts she scavenged from the towns around her. For an hour every day, she took her guitar into the booth and just played. Songs about lost love, songs about fear, songs about hope. Hope. More than anything else, she gave me hope. Gave _everybody_ hope, once she got her station connected with the government back west and they started playing those songs from Seattle to San Diego. That scene in _Love Survives_ where the soldiers run up to her and give her that huge group hug? That wasn't staged. They'll never admit it, they'll say "ah, I never liked her music, what business did that pop tart have calling herself a country singer", but I know otherwise.

That was the beauty of celebrities. America never had official royalty like the British did, so we treated celebrities as our next best thing. People like me, her, Roy Elliot, and many others. Before the war, a lot of us were vain and shallow. I'll be the first to admit it. Our big concerns were fashion, paparazzi, gossip blogs and the size of our Twitter followings. Twitter, now nothing symbolized pre-war narcissism better than that stupid website. Needless to say, a lot of people fantasized about just getting rid of all of us. And in Long Island, some of them got to live out those fantasies.

But just as celebrities can represent the worst in society – there's a reason why I have some Long Island footage favorited – they can also represent the best in us. Back in World War II, many actors proudly served in the armed forces, and the rest of them were committed to upholding the ideals that our country was built on and fighting, with their words, the forces that opposed us. Even later on, celebrities understood that they had the power to shape public opinion. Why do you think benefit concerts existed? Why do you think so many actors and musicians supported charities and activist groups? Yeah, I know that many of them had self-serving reasons for doing stuff like that – ego boosts, public relations – but I can tell you that just as many were sincere in their support.

The same thing happened during this war. We remembered that we were America's role models, America's royalty, and that we had to act like it. Just as our parents and siblings were on the front lines, it was our duty to win over the hearts and minds of the people. And nobody did that better than she did. She was as much a hero as Raj-Singh was.

Still is, if you ask me.

_[As Lena and I walk back to the parking lot, I check the news on my phone. The President has made a state visit to Moscow in order to smooth tensions between Russia and the Ukraine, and to seek Russian support in the international effort to clean out isolated regions of the globe. She stands head and shoulders over the Tsar at nearly six feet in height, and with her long blonde hair – a rarity in the post-war world – she looks ten years younger than the forty-something woman that she is.]_


	3. Tony Ruiz, Fort Yukon, Alaska

**FORT YUKON, ALASKA, USA**

_[Tony Ruiz asked me to meet him here at his family's estate rather than at their offices in Anchorage. His mother, Inez Ruiz, is the CEO of the Bank of Alaska, the second largest American-owned bank in the United States, and it is clear that she has raised her son well. Moose and bear heads hang on the walls of the office, and above the fireplace hangs an SIR rifle, a Lobo, and a blown-up photograph of Tony standing atop a small pile of dead zombies, his right hand raised to the sky clutching his rifle like Ash Williams. I take a seat across from him at his desk. Tony's deep brown skin is a rarity in Alaska, and his smooth suit and clean-shaven face betray his life of privilege.]_

I understand why the Cubans get so much credit for being where they are now. It took them only twenty years to throw off the shackles of communism and become a capitalist world power. They deserve all the praise they get for doing so much with so little in such a short time. Besides, it means that people like me don't have to grow up getting called "spic" or "beaner" like we used to. Kinda hard to do that when Spanish is practically mandatory in business school and you still keep most of your hard cash in Cuban pesos in case of inflation.

But can't we, for a second, save some love for the Alaskans?

Alaska was a bit like Cuba in a way. Economically, both of us were backwaters. In Cuba it was because of the embargo, but here it was simply because we were flat empty. There were only about 750,000 Alaskans when the Panic hit, about fifty thousand of them had moved up in the last twelve months, and most of them in general were, for lack of a better word, immigrants from the rest of the country.

_[Tony pauses for a second.]_

The only economy up here was oil and the military. We were rich, yeah, but that's because of the Permanent Fund Dividend – the share of the oil money that Juneau gave to every Alaskan. And the cost of living swallowed that dividend like a zed swallows a paralyzed chipmunk. Since hunting was mostly for sport back then, we had to import everything from the lower 48 – our food, our gas, our appliances, our spare parts, our electronics, _everything_. We were dependent on the outside world not just for our livelihoods, but for our very subsistence.

You can imagine how it went down once the Panic hit. The stores emptied out faster up here than anywhere else. The planes and the ships weren't coming in anymore, and the salmon fisheries were miles away from the cities. Or city, I should say; Anchorage was the only really big city in a thousand miles. At least down in the lower 48 you could keep moving, look for resources in the next town over. Here, there was no next town with a miraculously untouched general store, just the bush for hundreds of miles! Is it any wonder that, by the first spring after the Panic, there were only two hundred thousand Alaskans left? A lot of the little bush villages just dried up completely.

**What about refugees?**

What about 'em? Look at a map. You could get to, say, northern Saskatchewan just by driving north for a few days on relatively well-paved roads. In Alaska, on the other hand, the only ways in were by air, by sea, or by the Alcan Highway, which ran straight through the biggest mountains in North America. If you're listening to the media reports telling you to go north, where are you gonna go? Very few refugees made it across the sea or the mountains – and believe me, they tried. There were enough cars abandoned on that highway alone to supply all the steel Canada needed for half the war.

Most of the people who came to Alaska did so before the Panic, like my family. We grew up in San Diego, white picket fence, big SUV, soccer team, you know, good suburbanites. My mom moved us all up to Fort Yukon in March, a few months before the Panic. She saw the blogs, she knew that Phalanx didn't work. I thought she'd gone insane, gone Randy Weaver on us, maybe gotten a bit _too_ assimilated, if you know what I mean. Only later did I find out how right she was. We were lucky, we had nearly half a year to prepare before it all went to hell. Can't say the same for everyone else.

**What was it like living in Fort Yukon?**

It was tough. I mean, compared to the white zones it was paradise, but two years roughing it in the bush practically drove us insane. We were right on the Yukon River, which was utterly filled with salmon, and the woods were an all-you-can-eat buffet of moose. Combine that with the huge stocks of food we brought with us and the greenhouse we built, and food and water were never an issue. The biggest problems were the weather and the locals. The weather, well, that's a no-brainer. Fort Yukon's one of the coldest places in North America, and coming from southern California and having lots of family in Hermosillo, it felt like moving to Hoth.

But the locals were a whole 'nuther league. Most of the population pre-war was Gwich'in, the natives of the region. I'd always known what it's like to be unwelcome, given that I grew up Latino in one of the most conservative cities in California. But here it felt like living in the Jim Crow South. The natives saw us as invading their land, stealing their food, bringing booze into their town. "Meet the brown man, same as the white man," I heard one of them say. I'll admit, some of the guys who came up here after us did bring a lot of alcohol to barter with the locals, so the natives kind of had a point. I've heard about the killing that went on in Canada, I thank God every day that the army arrived when it did. For a long time we were effectively cut off from the mainstream life in the town. It's a good thing that there were so many other Latinos in Fort Yukon, otherwise there probably would've been a mob in front of our house by the first spring.

**Other Latinos?**

After the war they called it "bloc settlement". Groups of like-minded people moving to one particular area. To this day, Alaska's full of all sorts of little enclaves, communes and subcultures all over the bush. In the months between my family moving to Fort Yukon and the Panic, dozens of Latinos started following us up for some reason. Most likely so that they could be around other people who spoke Spanish, I guess. By the winter there was this little Mexicantown with about two hundred people in it. The same thing happened all over Alaska. There was that church from Missouri that up and moved to Galena _en masse_, Homer took in a lot of artsy hipsters, there was that fashion designer who moved to Bethel and seemingly brought half the New York Fashion Week with her, and you now have the huge gay community in Kenai that didn't exist before. Hell, Kodiak became a mecca for geeks, of all people, after all the writers for that big comedy website moved there. And of course, all over the place there are spots where a bunch of friends, family or co-workers made a pact and moved together.

My mom quickly emerged as the leader of the Latino community in Fort Yukon. Guess being part of the PTA was good experienced for negotiating between pissed-off people. She was the one who implemented the restrictions on liquor in order to mend things between the natives and the refugees. One day, she raised a posse and personally seized every single bottle of alcohol in the town, locking it away in the clinic to be used for medical and, being Catholic, religious purposes only. Back then I thought losing the bar ruined the only fun thing to do in town. Hey, I was a teenager then. Looking back, though, I think it was the smartest thing she could've done in that situation. If the bar stayed open, if the alcohol kept flowing, I believe that the natives would've rioted at some point. They _hated_ the liquor. They called it the demon drink, a phrase that I thought had died with the Ladies' Temperance Union. There were a whole bunch of other close calls, but fortunately the government came back after only two years.

**What happened then?**

Reclaiming Alaska was a huge priority for the new government. We had some of the last oil fields on the continent that hadn't been overrun, and more importantly, we had the means to get that oil down to the lower 48, or lower 10 plus Hawaii as it was by then. It took them only a week or two to clean out Anchorage and Valdez, and right then and there they were back to work restoring the pipeline. Plus, the entire state is absolutely covered in coal, with larger reserves than the entire lower 48. Sure, a lot of that was way up north where we couldn't get at it, but huge amounts were also located in places like the Mat-Su Valley and the Kenai Peninsula right outside of Anchorage. Most of Alaska was reclaimed after the first thaw, and what wasn't was reclaimed after the second.

After that, Alaska was the frosted engine that powered the American war machine. Millions of people started asking to be transferred up here. We had over two million people by the end of the war, the only US state to gain population. Alaska was thousands of miles away from the zombies, and even if they did come here, we wished them luck with the cold. It was an economic explosion that dwarfed the '70s oil boom, with the only limit to population growth being the size of our port facilities. Sam Elliott shot two propaganda films up here, one about the coal miners in Palmer and Wasilla, and the other about the oil workers in Prudhoe Bay and the ANWR. Hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. It's gonna get cleaned up eventually. Alaska's still booming to this day; they can't build apartments in Anchorage fast enough.

When my mom finished up her stint as an Army medic, she came right back up here. The war was winding down by then and the banking system was just being rebuilt, so she used her Spanish skills – very handy when Cuba's holding your purse strings – and some of her old connections in real estate to get into operating a bank. She climbed and clawed her way to the top of the new banking order, and from there started turning Anchorage into the new Wall Street. Okay, so that's kind of overstating her role, given that Anchorage was already a boomtown and a major stop on the way to the Far East, and let's face it, Havana's still the new Wall Street. But did you see that 40-story tower coming into Anchorage? That was all her. She wanted to build it higher, but Anchorage is prime earthquake territory, so the zoning board said no.

_[Tony's phone rings. He answers.]_

Hello? … Hey Mom. … I was just doing an interview with some guy from the UN, he's writing some history of the war. … Ah, it's coming along nicely. Sooner the Glades are cleared out, sooner we can start rebuilding Miami. … Well, I've gotta go. I'll see ya soon!

_[Tony hangs up.]_

That was Mom. She just landed at Stevens Airport, she and I have to be at a board meeting by six. It was great meeting with you! You can stop by some other time to finish up. Wait, first there's something I wanna show you.

_[I follow Tony into the garage to see a pair of Cadillac Escalades, one from before the war and one from after. He brings me to the new one.]_

Ah, the perks of your mom owning 20% of GM. This little thing is one of the first Cadillacs they made after the war. Sleek, compact, but with a high suspension and reinforced bumpers on both ends. Still unmistakably a Cadillac, don't get me wrong, but the first time I saw it I thought I was looking at an armored Subaru. Great bug-out cars, those Subarus. Is it any wonder why they're the biggest automaker in Japan now?

_[Tony leads me to the older Escalade.]_

Now, compare that to this thing. Does anything symbolize pre-war America better than a three-ton, $60,000 "sport-utility" vehicle that was really nothing more than a status symbol for soccer moms and rich musicians? The only reason we still keep it around is to bring it to car shows. Big, lumbering, and it couldn't even get through all the snow we had up here. We simply locked it up and used its engine as a generator.

Still, that thing had a sweet-ass sound system. Personally, I wish they still made cars like this just for that alone. They just don't make pimpmobiles like they used to.


	4. Paul Ennis, Galway, Ireland

_[Note: updated this entry to flesh out the neo-Troubles and the Transylvanian War a bit.]_

**GALWAY, IRELAND**

_[While the government of the Republic of Ireland moved back to Dublin seven years ago, Galway remains the chief industrial and cultural center of the island, and many government offices are still located in the city. Here, a coffee shop hawks fresh American coffee, still a luxury in Europe but with prices falling rapidly as trade is restored. It is in here where I meet Paul Ennis, a member of the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs who is himself chronicling Ireland's experience in the Zombie War, in a country-scale version of my own project.]_

Ireland was doomed, they said. We'd all seen what had happened to Iceland, and we were so much closer to the European mainland that the Panic had come to the Republic the moment that Dublin had even a whiff of a major outbreak. Boats were crossing the Irish Sea from Wales and Liverpool by the day. And what army did Ireland have to turn them back?

Turned out that what we had was plenty. Ireland had nearly eighteen thousand soldiers and reservists, nearly two thousand sailors, and about a thousand people in the Air Corps ready on the eve of the Panic. Most of our vehicles were trucks and APCs rather than large, gas-guzzling tanks and fighter planes. Ours was the kind of low-tech, infantry-heavy force that fared better than most in the war. We didn't have _no_ army like Iceland did, but neither did we have so much expensive, useless equipment like the Americans and so many of our fellow Europeans did. We were a small nation with only one real neighbor, what use did we have for all of that?

On top of that, our proximity to Europe was a blessing in disguise. It rarely got hot in Ireland during the summer, but it rarely got truly cold during the winter, either. That may sound like a bad thing, but hear me out, it was a blessing in disguise. People were being told to go north to escape the zombie plague in places where it would be frozen out, and Ireland just wasn't cold enough. Why stop in cool Ireland when you could go on to frigid Iceland?

_[Paul chuckles.]_

It was the same thing in Denmark; they just weren't cold enough for the millions of Germans passing through who viewed the place as a mere "North Hamburg" on the way to _true_ safety in Sweden and Norway. That was why, after they'd abandoned Copenhagen and pulled back to Jutland, they didn't have to deal with nearly as much as they'd thought.

Lastly, hardly any of the early infected were coming here! The Celtic Tiger days were long gone when the Panic started. People were leaving the country to find work, not coming in. No young idealistic Yankees were coming through our airports unless they were tourists here to drop some much-needed money into our pockets. It was like the old days, when we were a Second World country in the First World half of the continent. If you were a businessman from Shanghai looking for a place to escape to, would you pick Ireland, deep in the throes of a second Great Depression, or the UK, which still had a somewhat stable economy right up until the Panic began?

_**And then you had Britain.**_

I never thought I'd see the day when proud Irishmen would be welcoming the Brits into their country with open arms. You have to remember, many of us Irish view the Brits the same way, say, the Poles view the Germans and Russians. Britain gave us Cromwell, they gave us _an Gorta Mór_, the Great Hunger, they gave us Bloody Sunday, they gave us most of what made the "luck of the Irish" such a cruel joke throughout history. And at first, they gave us most of our zombies too. Wexford was the first city to fall, then Dublin herself. The Taoiseach barely made it out to Galway.

But then Britain gave us the mother of all sweetheart deals. They would provide us with protection, help train our forces, give us arms and ammunition, in exchange for food to feed those in their safe zone. You see, the Scottish Highlands aren't exactly the best place to grow food, and between them and the Norwegians, they were burning through the North Sea fish stocks as fast as the zeds burned through London and Dublin. Ireland, on the other hand, was a breadbasket. Mountains upon mountains of potatoes, plus pastures full of livestock that could easily be turned over to growing wheat. Not to mention our peat bogs, which kept our power plants going through the war.

Not everyone thought this was such a great deal, though. To a lot of patriots, we may as well have signed away our independence and gone back to being a British colony. They didn't care that Britain had its back up against the wall as much as we did. They didn't care what we were getting in return for our surplus food, all the guns and oil. They saw the arrival of British troops to clean out our east coast, not to mention the arrival of so many British citizens as, for all we knew, permanent residents, as an invasion, and, well, it got nasty. We were fighting the Troubles all over again, all over the island. There were at least three IRA wannabe groups shooting and bombing British soldiers and British refugees. One of them, the True IRA I think it was, had the gall to drive trucks full of zeds straight into the British camp at Kilkenny, nearly costing us the whole damn city! That, of course, only riled up the refugees and got them starting their own paramilitaries, carrying out their own atrocities. When the Vatican leadership finally gave up and fled to Armagh after the Italians retreated to the Alps, they were greeted with bullets – the Pope must've been very happy about that Popemobile, even if three of the cardinals weren't. Ever hear of Clonmel?

_**No.**_

_Good._

Leaders in both Galway and Inverness were afraid that we were gonna go the same way as all those Eastern European countries, letting nationalist bickering divert our attention from the real enemy.

_**The same way as Eastern Europe?**_

I once met a Romanian guy not long after the war. A bit of a shock, really, given how few of 'em there are left. When the Panic hit and Bucharest fell, the government tried pulling back into Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountains. On paper, it was an excellent idea. The Carpathians are a wall almost on par with the Alps, or your Rockies. They were protected in two directions, three if you count the fact that the Carpathians turn west just north of the Romanian border. Romania should've been one of the great survivors of the zombie war.

The problem was the fourth flank that the Carpathians _didn't_ cover.

You see, Hungary at the time was under the rule of a right-wing government, with an ultra-nationalist – dare I say, neo-fascist – party as a key component of the governing coalition. Hungary's original version of Redeker called on the government moving east to Debrecen, the surrounding plains, and the northern mountains, possibly coordinating with the Romanians across the border. However, Hungary and Romania had a century worth of bad blood between them, dating back to when Hungary was forced to cede Transylvania to the Romanians after the First World War. There were still thousands of ethnic Hungarians living in the region at the time. On top of that, rugged Transylvania made a much better fallback destination than Debrecen and the Northern Great Plain did. And so the ultra-nationalists decided to take this opportunity, with Romania weakened, to start a war and reclaim Hungary's ancestral lands – and get a nice extension to their safe zone while they were at it. They spent a year and half bleeding each other dry, killing almost as many people as Zack did, and the only thing left of either Hungary or Romania by the time the UN force liberated them were a few holdouts in the mountains. Barely more than a hundred thousand people left in each country.

That was hardly the only instance. Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania. Croatia and Bosnia. Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia and all the short-lived Caucasian states that popped up when the Russians pulled out. All flags that no longer fly except in museums and in people's homes, reduced to provinces of either the EU or Russia. The EU's whole "East European Administrative Region" came about because there literally weren't enough people left in these places to maintain functioning nation-states. The only pre-war countries still in one piece were Greece, Bulgaria, and Slovenia, and each of them simply waited until _after_ the zombie war to make their revanchist claims on their now-depopulated neighbors – the Slovenes with Istria, the Greeks with Epirus, the Bulgarians with eastern Serbia.

That's what we were afraid of. Letting old nationalist disputes get us killed. The British, as an olive branch, offered to bring the Irish government into their emergency coalition, much as they'd done with the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly. We'd have British troops on our soil, yes, but we'd also have a major say in the government. On top of that, they promised that, when the war was over, they would open discussions on the future status of Northern Ireland, including its possible incorporation into the Republic. _That_ certainly got our attention. There were still a few diehards who wouldn't put down their guns, but they were too few in number to matter. The Northern Irish surprisingly didn't have much of a problem with this – the arrival of a quarter million displaced Brits, most of them nominally Protestant, into the Republic, not to mention the hundreds of thousands more who made it to Northern Ireland, assuaged their concerns that they'd be drowned out by Catholics in a united Ireland. Our decision to accept the Queen as head of state also eased the concern of some of the unionists.

_**And today?**_

Well, for once, the luck of the Irish was a real thing. Fighting alongside the British rather than against them helped build up a sense of camaraderie, and by the time the Dublin Accord was signed, there was almost a sense of remorse that we were annexing their land. You couldn't find two better buds today. My grandfather said it would never happen, but a hundred years ago, people thought that the French and the Germans would be eternal enemies, and look at them.

Now, to the pub then?


	5. Giulia Maggio, Trentino, Italy

****_[Some minor updates, including adding some references to Venice and the Mafia.]_

**TRENTINO, ITALIAN REPUBLIC (NORTH ITALY)**

_[Giulia Maggio, the architect of Italy's Maggio Plan and a national hero to many North Italians, was initially reluctant to speak to me. Currently running for Prime Minister of Italy, her schedule is very busy, but her advisors convinced her that this would boost her numbers and demonstrate her commitment to the UN task force, so she arranged for me to speak to her at her private manor in the Italian Alps outside the city of Trento. Unlike many wartime emergency capitals, Trento remains the capital of North Italy given the thorough devastation of Rome and that city's proximity to South Italy, with whom North Italy's relations are cool at best. Maggio reminds me of an aging matriarch from the suburbs, only in much better shape; her skiing regimen has been taken up by many Italians.]_

Could you imagine? A woman, as Prime Minister of Italia, just twenty years after that worthless slimeball finished running this country into the ground? Many people say that the zombie war was what broke Italia, but that ape started the damn process. Not only did he bankrupt this country in his decade in office – two decades too long, if you ask me – he turned our media, our airwaves, into a foul cesspit of misogyny that we've just now recovered from. Women of my age were told that their only way forward was to either become housewives or go on TV and strip half-naked for the guys. One of our biggest talk shows had, as a key component, the _veline_, scantily-clad models/showgirls who handed the scripts to the presenters and danced around in skimpy clothes. Our worthless Prime Minister was hosting orgies with underage hookers. Domestic abuse was so bad that some report ranked half of Africa – _pre-war_ Africa, mind you – better than us in terms of the status of women. It was a world ruled by machismo, where the men ran the show and the women were all treated like prostitutes, shoved off into the background to look sexy and do little more. Most people have nostalgia for the pre-war era, but I don't.

_**Even if it means two Italies instead of one?**_

_[She takes a few seconds to answer.]_

Yes. We're a stronger nation than we were before, even if that's an awfully low bar to clear.

Like many capital cities, Roma fell quickly when _Il Panico_ began, with everybody running there looking for aid. But that alone doesn't explain why it was the first capital on the continent to be overrun. You see, Roma was more than just the political center of Italia, it was the spiritual capital for 1.2 billion Catholics. It was one of the holiest cities in the world, and so, much like Mecca and Varanasi, people kept pouring in by the thousands even after the Pope had fled to Ireland. It only got worse once those radical traditionalists took over what was left of St. Peter's Square and proclaimed themselves the "restored" Catholic Church. People thought that God would protect them in Roma, just as He had guided Constantine to victory. It became the hottest white zone on the continent, worse than Lourdes, even. It took the effort of the French, the Germans, even the Swiss to finally clean it out.

And the government, to its credit, realized this from day one. Flights were already pouring into the city even a few days before the Panic really reached Italia. They thought that they would be able to quarantine Roma, keep the outbreak in Italia limited to the plains of Lazio and Tuscany, west of the Apennines, and stamp out the infection in other cities. We would emerge as the powerhouse of Europe, they said.

And then everything went to hell.

_**How, exactly?**_

Well, remember when I told you about how that unmentionable scumbag of a Prime Minister destroyed this country? I lied. Oh, he was a big part of it, to be sure, but our problems went way back. Our post-war – World War II, I mean – constitution was purposely designed to keep Italia divided. Neither the right nor the left wanted the other side to be able to take over the country, so they practically wrote gridlock into our constitution as a compromise. The Americans think they had it bad? Ha! Not a single government after World War II lasted to the end of its elected term, and not a single Prime Minister lasted more than five years at a time. We had neo-fascists in our parliament, we had communists, and when they got together, we had the_ Anni di Piombo_ – the Years of Lead. Our system was fundamentally broken, and it was barely holding the nation together in peacetime.

After Arezzo, our Yonkers, the system failed entirely, and a huge regional split developed in our politics. Those in the south of Italy felt that we were spending too much time trying to defend the north – a futile effort, they said – and that it would be better to withdraw to Sicily and Sardinia. Northerners countered that the north had the high mountains, narrow passes, and cold weather that those islands didn't. Not to mention Fortress Venezia, the old floating city, the only Italian city to have more people now than twenty years ago. It got heavily redeveloped in the process, but hey, we were just making new history. Furthermore, while Sicily and Sardinia would only be able to receive assistance from the French, in the north we would also be able to get help from Germany and Austria over land. My pitch for Italy's version of Redeker, what we now know as the Maggio Plan, said that we could do both, resupplying Sicily and Sardinia from the north's seaports at Genoa and Venetia.

While that ultimately was the plan that the Italian government pursued, let's just say that one of the big selling points of it, the fact that the Germans would be able to assist us, went over precisely the opposite of how I thought it would. In hindsight, I was a fool to think that there wouldn't be much opposition to that point.

_**What was their problem with the Germans?**_

You have to understand, all of this was happening at the height of a massive debt crisis. Our last pre-war Prime Minister was a technocrat who had practically been installed by the Germans to make sure that we paid our debt in full, even if that meant a severe program of economic austerity that threw our nation into a deep, _deep_ recession. The whole south of Europe – not just Italy, but also Greece, Spain, Portugal – held mountains of resentment against Germany for its economic domination of the EU. The Sicily and Sardinia plan wasn't just a strategic decision, it was also an emotional one. By retreating onto those islands, we would be able to symbolically declare independence, relying on Italian ingenuity rather than having to turn to the Germans for aid and go deeper in debt to them.

Sicilia was the first to declare independence, followed by Sardinia. Before long, all the southern regions were throwing their support to the Sicilians, directing their populations to go to the islands, and even military commanders down there were joining the rebels. Meanwhile, as we were trying to figure out what to do about all of this, we got pushed back to the Po and the Taro rivers. Milano was overrun, and we just barely held Torino and Genoa – and that was only because the French bailed us out, not wishing to see a zombie-infested wasteland on their eastern flank. You see, the French decided to cleanse that festering wound in Milano with a nice big nuke.

_[Giulia facepalms before speaking again.]_

_**Something tells me you don't think much of the nuking of Milan.**_

Even our generals could scarcely have imagined that French military assistance would consist of _that_. But in hindsight, we should've known. Unlike the rest of the world, the French were hardly shy about using the Bomb to slow the zombie menace while they pulled back to their safe zone in Corsica, the Rhone valley, and the Mediterranean coast. We're talking about the guys who flipped the bird to Greenpeace and went on with nuclear testing in the South Pacific in the '90s. Two nukes they dropped as they retreated, one on Dijon and the other on Toulouse. It sounded like a good idea at the time. The zombies that weren't flash-incinerated or set on fire, burned to the point of immobility after half an hour at most, got hit by the blast. Now, zombies are pretty resistant to hydrostatic shock, but they're a lot less resistant to getting flung by an atomic shockwave. Even those who didn't get their heads smashed against walls in an instant probably had half the bones in their bodies broken. To the French, this was a lot better than wasting conventional munitions. This was the country that had mastered the atom, got three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear energy before the war, and never had a single meltdown before, during, or after the war! Oh, sure, there's still nuclear waste unaccounted for, but whatcha gonna do?

It was only when they started pushing back when the French realized just what kind of shit they'd gotten themselves into with those nukes. With the radiation lingering around Dijon and Toulouse, they couldn't go in and clean out whatever zombies were still in there. Not even the French, the foolhardy bastards who rushed headfirst into Paris, were willing to touch those places. It took years of cleanup in those cities to render them remotely habitable again. It was the same in Milano. To their credit, the French footed most of the bill for the cleanup there after we complained to them about it, even if it had to wait until after the war.

But oh, did the Sicilians have a propaganda field day with that one. They still say that we're so submissive to the EU that we let them drop a nuke on our heads. The Sicilians never had to suffer _that_ indignity, oh no! They fought WWZ all by themselves! They're free of the EU and proud of it!

Yeah, and look what it's gotten them. A backwater with a stagnant economy, run by mobsters turned neo-fascists who claim that all their woes are because of European sabotage. The eruption of Vesuvio? A European seismic device, of course! Their "Republic of the Mezzogiorno" is like some sort of pre-war Third World dictatorship, the kind that ranted about "Western imperialism" to cover for their own failings. It would be merely funny if it weren't planted right in the heart of Western civilization, and if it weren't hypocritically recolonizing what's left of Libya.

Whenever people talk about how the zombie war threw us back to the 19th century, or talk about how Italia should go its own way from the EU, I instruct them to visit South Italia. I did, a few months ago, to gauge the possibility of improving relations and maybe even reunification. I'm an Italian patriot, so I'd long been intrigued by the idea of reunifying the peninsula. After my visit, though, all those thoughts were struck from my head. North Italia's better off without them, if you ask me. Modern medicine is restricted to the elite, most people live in shacks, freedom is a joke, and the infrastructure is rotted. The ruling class is almost entirely descended from the pre-war organized crime families, the Mafia, the Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta. The only thing keeping them in one piece is Libyan oil. The way I see it, Italia now ends at the southern borders of Lazio and Abruzzo. We have a new constitution, a stable democracy, a booming economy, and a free, happy and, yes, independent people.

I'm only running for Prime Minister of one country, and that's the Italia we have now.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.


End file.
